Group Policy, Slow Applying GP to clients

[jman167]

Hi, we have a rather annoying problem. Our network drive for pupil resources is sometimes not being mapped when clients log on to machines in a certain room. All the clients run back to the same switch which runs at 1GB connection.

Obviously, as the clients eventually get a connection, there isn't a fundamental problem with the link or any batch files or scripts that are running this process. We have come to the some what cloudy conclusion that the problem is being caused by group policy being applied to slowly and thus not mapping certain drives quickly enough during log-on.

My question is this: does anybody know of any reason why, on a server 2003 and client XP network, there would be any problem with group policy being applied slowly? This is fast becoming one of the more irritating problems we've ever had here, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jonathan Hambleton
ICT Network Technician
Reddish Vale Tech College

[Geoff]

Check your system for 'fun' common problems that cause GPO's to fail in interesting ways. These include DNS, Kerberos and Time sync. The GPMC, netdiag and dcdiag will help you detect these.

If you are running batch files from GPO's there is a default timeout of 600 seconds. If the batch file takes longer than this to run, it'll be terminated. If your batch file isn't doing anything complicated then I'd suspect either network problems or filesystem/share rights to be the issue.